Learn Japanese - HeyJapan

I'm enjoying the app's "gamification" for learning Japanese as a total beginner starting from zero. For me this app works well when paired with many other study materials, including flash cards that helped me memorize hiragana by associating the symbols with imagery + physical texts (e.g. a book on particles, a textbook called genki etc.). Giving this three stars because there are some very distracting app issues that need attention for us loyal paying subscribers :). For example on my iPad some of the vocab flash cards within lessons do not display the picture properly after clicking on the card to turn it over. There are also sync issues across devices. The notebook feature, for example, is available on iPad but is not on either iPhone nor computer web browser (particularly annoying when I want to open the notebook on my computer browser or iPhone so that I can review grammar previously learned via iPad. Also, even in iPad the notebook shows blank entries that when you click on them pop open a message telling you to alert the devs. Which brings me to the last gripe I have...there is no way to contact support through the app (or at least, no user friendly/easy way to do so)

I’m not a native speaker, but I lived in JP and I’m using this app to brush up. It’s a fantastic start help you understand how words are said and very helpful in learning Hiragana and Katakana. I highly recommend if this is your first time self studying or not. It gets a bit monotonous if you know basic Japanese phrases but it’s good practice. My only gripe is that some of the vocab is more like Japanese from 10 years ago, these days we don’t use some words or phrases that are taught in this app so keep that in mind. Also, if you’re looking to further your self study, use this app along side separate notes and utilize a chat app to talk to a Japanese speaker or find a tutor. がんばって！！

I really like this app. It starts out teaching you grammar from the very beginning and builds up the sentences so you quickly can understand even long (simple) sentences. I feel like I've learned more with it in a few days than the months I spent on vocabulary alone. Also, you can choose your difficulty and you can choose what shows (romaji which I turned off, kanji and katakana). The only reason I rated this 4 stars is because there's a few bugs. 1. Sometimes the voice is wrong. One question started with それ (so-re) but it said su-ri and I was so confused I had to listen to it a few times. Thankfully, it was written so I knew it had messed up. (Only one I remember it happened with) and 鳥 the last writing stroke is wrong. 2. Once in a while です just shows as で (and is higher than the rest of the line) 3. On build the sentence questions, if there are too many choices I can't see some of them (I only see the top of the box the choice is in) and there's no scroll option so I have to choose it to see if it's the right thing. Luckily there haven't been any with so many choices that the choices can't be grabbed, yet.